- Hi. I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative.
In this video, I'm gonna show you
how many lumens you need for your projector,
what a lumen is,
why all lumens aren't created equal,
and how you can hack a little bit more brightness
out of your projector without increasing the lumens.
(bright casual music)
Before we talk about how many lumens
you need for your projector,
we first need to talk about what is a lumen.
A lumen is a measure of brightness
coming from a light source.
An example would be a light, the sun,
a projector, a flashlight.
Anything like that will have a lumen rating.
Now when it comes to projectors,
not all lumens are created equal.
There's two main types of lumens
that get measured for projectors.
There's white lumens and there's color lumens.
A lot of projector companies will just market
the white lumens that come from a projector,
but it's very, very important
to look at the color lumens as well.
If you don't have a good color lumen rating,
then you won't see the colors as bright or as vivid,
and it won't look as good compared to a projector
that has a high color lumen rating.
So when you compare your projectors,
you wanna try to have an equal white lumen rating
to your color lumen rating.
For a projector like this,
this has 6,000 white lumens and 6,000 color lumens.
That means that it has very bright and vivid colors
all the way around.
It's a very evenly rounded projection.
Now how many lumens do you need for your event?
We're gonna talk about three different types of events.
Two of them are kind of similar.
We're gonna talk about outdoor events,
we're gonna talk about indoor events
with a high amount of ambient light,
like a hall or a wedding venue,
and we're gonna talk about indoor controlled environments,
such as a conference room where there's no exterior light,
there's no ambient light,
it's just a room with four walls
that you can control the light completely.
So if you're talking about outdoor projection,
I recommend that you go with a 5,000 lumen projector
like this one in front of me
for an outdoor projection screen
of up to eight feet wide.
That will get you a projected image onto a screen
about an hour before sunset.
If you're trying to project an image onto your screen
before an hour before sunset,
I highly recommend that you consider
either renting a TV for your event
or using an LED video wall.
Both of those options are far better for your event.
Outdoor projection is pretty much a no go
for any event during the daytime.
You would need an extremely high projection rating
at the point that it would be way more cost effective
to use an LED video wall or a TV rental.
So please consider those
if your event is outdoor during the day.
Now this 5,000 lumen projector here
will get you a good image on the screen
about an hour before sunset.
So if you're doing an outdoor movie night,
this will get you an hour more video time
compared to a 3000 lumen projector.
Now you might be able to limp with a 3000 projector
if you're completely willing and able
to wait until after sunset.
This little 3000 lumen projector
will work great on an eight foot wide screen.
That's super popular at weddings and backyard movie nights,
and that type of event.
But if you wanna get a jump on it,
if you want to keep your wedding on schedule
and those types of things,
you definitely need to have a higher projector rating.
Now, if your event is indoor
in an environment with a high amount of ambient light,
like a hall or a golf course
or something like that with a lot of windows,
it really does depend
on the amount of windows in that hall.
If you have a ton of windows as to make it look
like it's an outdoor event,
then again, I highly recommend that you go with the TV.
Now, if it has a medium amount of windows,
which is hard to judge,
but if it's a typical wedding hall
where there's one wall of windows, we highly recommend
either a 5,000 or a 6,000 lumen projector
for daytime projection
inside on an eight foot wide screen.
Now, obviously if you go with a smaller screen,
you can go with a bit smaller projector.
So if you go with a six foot wide projector screen,
you could probably limp with about 4,500 lumens.
If you go with a 10 foot wide or a 12 foot wide screen,
I would highly recommend getting 8,000 lumens,
maybe 10,000 lumens.
Now you can see the cost starts going up exponentially
once you're trying to get a bigger screen
in those environments that don't have
controlled amounts of ambient light.
So now let's talk about an indoor event
in a controlled environment, like a conference room.
You can get a 6,000 lumen projector
all the way up to 16 feet wide
if you can control the light
down to a dinner level setting.
If you can use stage lights to make your stage bright
and you can keep the room quite dark,
you can save a lot of money on projection.
If you want a high amount of ambient light on the room,
if you want the ballroom lights on full,
then you probably need something closer
to eight or 10,000 lumens
for that large 16 foot wide screen.
Then if you have that high ambient light amount,
then you can use a 6,000 lumen projector
for something that's maybe 12 feet wide instead.
And then 5,000 lumen projector
would do well for a 10 foot wide screen
and a 4,000 lumen projector,
or maybe even a 3,000 lumen projector
would do well for an eight foot tripod screen,
again, just depending a little bit
on what the lights are set to inside the venue.
But we regularly use a 6,000 lumen projector
on a 16 foot wide projector screen
if we can control the light inside the venue.
It looks great. We've never had any complaints.
But, again, we are using
a high quality 6,000 lumen projector
like this Epson here beside me
that has a really, really high color rating
compared to some other brands of projectors.
Some 6,000 lumen projectors
will have 6,000 lumens of white,
but they'll only have 3,000 or 4,000 lumens of color,
and those just won't pull it compared to this.
Now, a couple of hacks that you can use
so you don't need as much brightness for your image.
One is to use high contrast images.
That means that if you're doing an outdoor movie night
or something related to an outdoor event,
an animated film or animated images
will show up much earlier than real life film
where there's faces and real camera work being used.
Something like a live action film.
If you're watching Avengers,
you're really gonna have to wait
until it's later on in the evening
until you can see the detail
that the film creators have put into a film like that.
But if you watch something like cartoons,
you can get going a lot easier
because the cartoons have such high contrast color
that you don't need that raw amount of brightness.
You can cheat it just by seeing the high contrast
between the colors that are on the screen.
Another hack to help save you
the amount of lumens that you need for your projector
is to use a short-throw lens.
If you can shorten the distance
between the projector and the screen,
that means that there's less light interference
going between the beam of the projector and the screen.
If you use a long lens and a bright projector
all the way to a screen,
there's so much room for light interference
that a lot of those light waves
just don't make it to the screen.
If you can get that projector closer,
use a wide angle lens, then you can get away
with a projector that's not as bright
because it has less material and less atoms
to project through to get to the screen.
I hope this video has been helpful.
If you have any other tips or recommendations
for types of projectors to use in various venues,
I wanna hear what you have to say.
Please leave a comment in the comment section below.
And if you wanna see more videos like this in the future,
please like and subscribe.
Thank you for watching.
(bright casual music)